I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

Cameron gave a presentation at CinemaCon last year where he introduced higher frame rates as the “future of cinema,” and said, “If watching a 3D movie is like looking through a window, then [with this] we’ve taken the glass out of the window and we’re staring at reality.” Peter Sciretta of Slashfilm went from saying, “The footage shot at 48 frames a second looked incredible,” to “It looked like a made for television BBC movie.… It looked like when you turn your LCD television to the 120 hertz up-conversion setting.… It looked uncompromisingly real—so much so that it looked fake.”

Jackson defended the footage after the fact, telling EW, ”Nobody is going to stop. This technology is going to keep evolving. At first it’s unusual because you’ve never seen a movie like this before.… It’s literally a new experience, but you know, that doesn’t last the entire experience of the film; not by any stretch, after 10 minutes or so. That’s a different experience than if you see a fast-cutting montage at a technical presentation.… There can only ever be a real reaction, a truthful reaction, when people actually have a chance to see a complete narrative on a particular film.… You settle into it.”

As a hedge against audience reaction and the theater’s skepticism about the new technology, the film will be released in a crazy number of formats: 3D, 2D and IMAX 3D, each in the traditional 24-frames style and the new 48-frames version. This will be an effective multivariate test of how consumers vote with their ticket purchases, but the debate about whether people will “get used to it” is perhaps missing the most interesting point.

Sciretta’s description of his reaction is very revealing. “The footage opened up with wide expansive shots of people walking on mountains and over rich green landscapes — those awesome shots that became synonymous with the Lord of the Rings series when it began a decade ago,” he writes. “These shots looked incredible — almost like something you would see in an IMAX 3D nature documentary — so extremely vivid and breathtaking, and more real than we’ve ever seen these shots before.… This is the future of Cinema… I thought… But my amazement quickly came to an end as the sizzle reel transitioned from the landscape footage to the character centric. Everything looked so… different. It was jarring.”

The break point in his experience reminds me of the section in Adrian Bejan and Peder J. Zane’s Design in Nature, that describes eye movement as a combination of “long and the fast” horizontal moves and “short and slow” vertical ones. Bejan uses this fact to explain our preference for “golden rectangles,” but I think the same insight can help explain why the faster frame rates work much better for distance shots than for closeups.

The “wide expansive shots of people walking on mountains and over rich green landscapes” of New Zealand were convincing to the audience because the dominant movement in these scenes is horizontal and can be scanned across quickly. The reel abruptly cuts to an interior shot of The White Council featuring Saruman, Gandalf, Galadriel and Elrond discussing the Morgul blade that Gandalf has just placed on a table before them, with a green screen in the background. The following scene shows a “prison-crypt, where Gandalf is investigating in the dark, using only his staff as a light source.”

These closer up shots force the viewer to scan their eyes up and down to see the changes in the characters’ faces and body positions and to separate the figures from the background. These shorter movements are slower than the wide sweeping ones we use to take in landscapes and it could be that there is a cognitive “breakpoint” here that we stumble across when we move from 24fps to 48fps.

Like the “retina” display that is supposed to cross the threshold beyond which we cannot discern any additional detail, there may be such thresholds for the speed of moving images. But unlike pure resolution—image pixels—experiences that engage illusions of depth and movement—moving pixels— trigger decidedly unpleasant sensations. My own experience of the 3D effects in Avatar involved considerable vertiginous discomfort, and I think it is the combination of price and sensory ambivalence that has slowed the adoption of 3D films by consumers.

So the question is, are Cameron and Jackson solving a problem that we do not actually have? There is no question that filmmakers and the movie industry in general need to create experiences in the theater that cannot easily be recreated in the home theater (much less the iPad) if they are to be able to continue to make big budget movies. But only some of what is technologically possible will turn out to be cognitively enjoyable for theater goers. It may be that there needs to be (or in fact already is) a process of video mastering that adjusts the frame rate effects based on the focal length of the scene. But Jackson’s assertion that we will just “settle into it,” is not convincing. We may, or we may not. It will be interesting to see how popular the different formats turn out to be when The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is finally released. If it is as good a movie as the other films of the franchise, nobody will fuss about the format. If the frame rate turns out to be a major point of criticism, it will not be a good sign.

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I am with you entirely on cognition. Cognition is CHANGING as we evolve. I truly believe my high school students have an evolved cognition as a result of their exposure to a different media diet. I am admittedly a failed video-gamer. I saved the princess in the late 80s and alas, I have no more trophies. FPS means “frames per second” to me, not “first person shooter” (a loathsome genre, you heathens). But in all seriousness, if you grew up this way, and were so vested that you wanted the latest CPU and GPU to reduce motion artifacts, then 48fps for THE HOBBIT and other media is going to work for you quite well. Just not for me and the legion of old, purist cinefarts.

You’re missing the point, but because I’m a magnanimous humanoid, I’m going to ingratiate your plebeian walnut–especially since I’ve now seen both variations of THE HOBBIT, and found the 48fps version anathema. It optically undermines the narrative. It’s a distraction, a compromise, a gimmick. It is NOT an evolution of the genre. You know what 48fps for narrative cinema is, Michael? It’s the Victorinox Champ–no, Super Champ (http://goo.gl/9IM5h)! It’s cramming MORE into less, and making the entire thing even less useful in turn.

You’re a gamer. I am not. I am a cinephile. 24fps is the AESTHETIC convention. It has since been relegated as the scientific convention as well. Therefore, since this thread is about the experimentation in the field of cinema, not gaming, perhaps YOU’RE the one that needs to cite sources. I have been looking for that article about visual persistence, retinal/foveal persistence, and the sequence in which our optical system perceives things like motion/color/contrast/definition for the better part of a decade now. I regret that I didn’t save that paper.

The motion blur you wish to negate when gaming is precisely what makes cinema feel like cinema. If you want to innovate, do what Spielberg and his cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski did for SAVING PRIVATE RYAN–completely change the shutter from 180º to a 45º shutter so that you create a new aesthetic, such that ALL war scenes from here forward will emulate your attempt to emulate WWII newsreel footage. The output is STILL 24fps (the narrative gold standard for legacy and scientific rationale), but each frame is exposed for a fraction of the time it typically would be, generating a frame-to-frame “look” that “feels” different, but still feels like film.

I don’t want a film to feel like a first person shooter video game as you suggest. That’s just plain wrong. I WANT the slight blur. It’s impressionistic. It makes me WORK, it signals my brain to suspend my disbelief because what I’m watching is theater and photography combined, and when it’s done well, it’s the most powerful story-telling medium humans have devised.

And I’d still damn well eff with your TV if you were watching material originated in 24fps interpolated at 120Hz, and I’ll continue to write about how 48fps isn’t right for narrative cinema (and documentary cinema, too).

I’m not trying to be a neo-luddite here, but your defaming of my cinema-viewing experience is as ridiculous as me trying to convince you to play your first person shooter games on a blurry cathode ray tube standard definition TV. Stick to your games and I’ll stick to cinema.

I don’t know yet what the benefits or drawbacks of higher frame rates are, but with 3D, those of us with an astigmatism are simply made nauseous from the experience. I’m left wondering if the issue with higher frame rates might be similar, that certain visual problems not corrected easily with lenses, lead to different and unpleasant experiences.

I have a slight astigmatism and have never heard that this is a cause to a bad experience with 3D, but it rings true to me. I watched THE HOBBIT first in standard 2D, then tonight in 3D HFR (48fps). Hated it. A TOTAL distraction to the story.

Say what you want about the script/adaptation veracity/direction/acting/effects/cinematography/etc., I loved the 2D first viewing and was annoyed for the 3D/48 viewing. It did NOT create a better experience for me.

A film is a drama, and its essence is story. When it becomes about dots, rather than plot, all is lost. The 1970′s Rankin Bass adaptation was pure genius. I’d pay $50 to own a good adaptation in that style. Jackson is a hack, and I fully expect to be disappointed by his version when I download it free from some pirate website.

I could care less about the format. I’m more concerned about how a story that I view as a classic, even THE CLASSIC from which all other modern fantasy stories drew, is handled.

I’m worried. I thought Del Toro was a mistake from the first, but I’m concerned about the shift back to Jackson too. I mean, if he thought he could do it why not just do it himself from the beginning? I loved Fellowship, but his work deteriorated over the course of the first 3 films.

If Hobbit winds up being 3 hours of over the top effects, splash and directorial license I’ll walk out before it ends. I’m not going to care what format it’s playing in if Jackson has screwed it up like he did Return of The King

@ C.Byrne “So once again we are introduced to a technological advancement we didn’t want, didn’t need and don’t like. And once again the problem is, apparently, with the customer not those pushing or using the technology.”

Who are the “we” you speak of? You certainly don’t speak for me. I for one, can’t wait for The Hobbit, in all it’s 48FPS 5KHD 3D glory.

24FPS 3D hurts my eyes, and my head because my brain is filling in the missing images that happen between frames. Life is INFINITE FPS HD 3D, and my eyes and head don’t hurt.

48FPS is twice the images of normal film, so my brain will work less, and hopefully hurt less. Add the magic of a more fully immersive experience with 5K HD, and it’s going to be as close to stepping in to Middle Earth as technology will allow. How is that a bad thing?

All these sheep who believe a few whining film nerds who saw some unfinished footage and equate that with a finished product that they will automatically hate before they’ve laid eyes on a single frame is insane.

If you all want to stay in the standard def blurry past, feel free. In fact, why not throw away your TVs, and organize some Radio drama? When you get tired of trying to focus on the unfocasable, we’ll be waiting in the future.

@ C.Byrne “So once again we are introduced to a technological advancement we didn’t want, didn’t need and don’t like. And once again the problem is, apparently, with the customer not those pushing or using the technology.”

Who are the “we” you speak of? You certainly don’t speak for me. I for one, can’t wait for The Hobbit, in all it’s 48FPS 5KHD 3D glory.

24FPS 3D hurts my eyes, and my head because my brain is filling in the missing images that happen between frames. Life is INFINITE FPS HD 3D, and my eyes and head don’t hurt.

48FPS is twice the images of normal film, so my brain will work less, and hopefully hurt less. Add the magic of a more fully immersive experience with 5K HD, and it’s going to be as close to stepping in to Middle Earth as technology will allow. How is that a bad thing? Many sporting events are broadcast in 60FPS HD and no one is whining about that.

All these sheep who believe a few whining film nerds who saw some unfinished footage, and then equate that with a finished product that they will automatically hate before they’ve laid eyes on a single frame is insane.

If you all want to stay in the standard def blurry past, feel free. In fact, why not throw away your TVs, and organize some Radio drama? When you get tired of trying to focus on the unfocasable, we’ll be waiting in the future.

@ C.Byrne “So once again we are introduced to a technological advancement we didn’t want, didn’t need and don’t like. And once again the problem is, apparently, with the customer not those pushing or using the technology.”

Who are the “we” you speak of? You certainly don’t speak for me. I for one, can’t wait for The Hobbit, in all it’s 48FPS 5KHD 3D glory.

24FPS 3D hurts my eyes, and my head because my brain is filling in the missing images that happen between frames. Life is INFINITE FPS HD 3D, and my eyes and head don’t hurt.

48FPS is twice the images of normal film, so my brain will work less, and hopefully hurt less. Add the magic of a more fully immersive experience with 5K HD, and it’s going to be as close to stepping in to Middle Earth as today’s technology will allow. How is that a bad thing? Many sporting events are broadcast in 60FPS HD and no one is whining about that.

All these sheep who believe a few whining film nerds who saw some unfinished footage, and then equate that with a finished product that they will automatically hate before they’ve laid eyes on a single frame is insane.

If you all want to stay in the standard def blurry past, feel free. In fact, why not throw away your TVs, and organize some Radio drama? When you get tired of trying to focus on the unfocasable, we’ll be waiting in the future.